LES RESSOURCES LANGAGIERES : CONSTRUCTION ET EXPLOITATION A universal Amazigh keyboard for Latin script and Tifinagh Paul Anderson
[email protected] 1. Introduction Systems of Amazigh text encoding and corresponding keyboard layouts have tended to be narrowly aimed at specific user communities, because of differences in phonology and orthography across Amazigh language variants1. Keyboard layouts for language variants have therefore lacked orthographic features found in other regions. This restricted focus impedes users' experimentation with the writing of other Amazigh regional variants and converged literary forms where they differ in orthographic features or in script. So far there has been no way to type more than a handful of Amazigh variants intuitively on any one layout even within one script. This fragmented development has meant that keyboard driver implementations have often lagged behind advances in technology, and have usually failed to take into account general keyboard layout design, ergonomy and typing speed, and solutions from other Amazigh regions or non-Amazigh languages. Some users even preferred to improvise key definitions based on their own understanding, which often resulted in mistaken use of lookalike letters and diacritics. Keyboard layouts have also failed to provide for Amazigh minority populations around the world, and have considered the multilingual context of Amazigh language use only locally. Several scripts are commonly used to write Amazigh variants, and even within a script there are different orthographies in use. Some orthographies are formal 1 I use the term 'language variant' since distinguishing 'dialect' and 'language' is not necessary here. ~ 165 ~ LES RESSOURCES LANGAGIERES : CONSTRUCTION ET EXPLOITATION standards. In others, some features are obsolete but still in use, some features are still disputed, and some features are regional usages or personal initiatives, or are required only for writing more phonetically.